For Carl Edwards, Silence Feeds the Fire

Carl and the Gibson guitar

I’m wondering how long Carl Edwards can keep mum about his intentions for the future. The current Sprint Cup point leader, just coming off a sweep of the Nationwide Series’ 2011 Nashville races, continues to be coy with NASCAR’s media types. This is doing nothing but stir the writers and commentators into an ever –growing frenzy. Maybe Carl likes riding the whirlwind. I think I’d get tired of it real fast.

Roush-Fenway Racing president Steve Newman says, "We have constant conversations with Carl, I still remain cautiously optimistic that we'll get something done, but as we've talked about before, the process that we're going through, we want to make sure that we have everything in order going forward and Carl's main focus is on making sure he's going to a place where he can win championships.” Both Roush-Fenway and Ford don’t want to lose Edwards so I suspect the dollar amount needed to entice him to stay must be going up while Carl remains non-committal. Knowing how tight Jack Roush is, will Ford fill out the amount required to keep Edwards driving cars adorned with the blue oval? Roush will have at least two good options to fill a potential void if Edwards does leave. As you can imagine, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. or Trevor Bayne would be more than happy to step in and either will drive for a lot less than Carl will be making.

It was recently announced Roush-Fenway is losing one of their primary sponsors after the 2011 season. Seagram’s Crown Royal is pulling out from Matt Kenseth’s number 17 Ford. This while UPS (a Ragan sponsor) and AFLAC (an Edwards sponsor) are also unsigned. Are they ready to bail too? It makes me wonder if any of Carl’s sponsors (Fastenall, Subway, AFLAC, Scott’s Ortho) would also leave RFR if Carl moves on? I know it depends on the contract terms as to when that might happen.

So, if Carl’s sponsors are stuck on him and leave over time, old Jack Roush may have to do some fancy footwork to keep a four car Sprint Cup team in place, especially if the other RFR sponsors also begin pulling the plug.

These sponsor concerns make me then wonder about the rumors that Carl would drive the Home Depot sponsored number 20 for J.R. Gibbs if that’s the deal. How does he do that if AFLAC or his other sponsors follow him? I’m sure these are the kinds of problems Joe Gibbs would love to deal with. The addition of Carl’s sponsors to JGR could make a four car Cup team possible.

Concerning Carl, Joe Gibbs has confirmed on more than one occasion he’s very interested in bringing
Carl on board. JGR has not had a champion since Tony Stewart won his second title in 2005, which incidentally was the last time a non-Lowes sponsored car won NASCAR’s Cup championship. Another consideration is that Toyota still hasn’t had a Cup champion. Couple that fact with Home Depot’s desire to unseat Lowes and you’ve got two pretty powerful sources of funding potentially available for JGR to entice an Edwards’ switch.

Finally, if Edwards were to make the switch from RFR/Ford to JGR/Toyota how would that affect Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano? I think good things would come out of the added competition concerning Kyle and Denny but I’m not so sure about Logano. I can see Logano falling into a funk that might only be solved by leaving JGR.

With all this speculation swirling around where Carl Edwards is concerned, there’s one thing that’s certain: The longer Carl keeps his mouth shut the greater the odds are that a change is coming…